ABSTRACT
The quantification of the extent and dynamics of land-use changes is a key metric employed to assess the progress toward several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) that form part of the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda. In terms of anthropogenic factors threatening the conservation of heritage properties, such a metric aids in the assessment of achievements toward heritage sustainability solving the problem of insufficient data availability. Therefore, in this study, 589 cultural World Heritage List (WHL) properties from 115 countries were analyzed, encompassing globally distributed and statistically significant samples of "monuments and groups of buildings" (73.2%), "sites" (19.3%), and "cultural landscapes" (7.5%). Land-cover changes in the WHL properties between 2015 and 2020 were automatically extracted from big data collections of high-resolution satellite imagery accessed via Google Earth Engine using intelligent remote sensing classification. Sustainability indexes (SIs) were estimated for the protection zones of each property, and the results were employed, for the first time, to assess the progress of each country toward SDG Target 11.4. Despite the apparent advances in SIs (10.4%), most countries either exhibited steady (20.0%) or declining (69.6%) SIs due to limited cultural investigations and enhanced negative anthropogenic disturbances. This study confirms that land-cover changes are among serious threats for heritage conservation, with heritage in some countries wherein the need to address this threat is most crucial, and the proposed spatiotemporal monitoring approach is recommended.
ABSTRACT
The compatible conservation of ecosystem services (ES) refers to the sustainable development of a region and the multiple dimensions of the region population's well-being. Applying the ES relationship to systematic conservation planning (SCP) can help determine the protection priorities associated with ES and support good zoning decisions. This study uses Nanchang, China as a case study to construct a multi-scenario ES protection scheme. This includes evaluating the spatial distribution characteristics of four core ES, and the ES relationships in the subregion in Nanchang. The ES relationship is then used to construct three ES conservation scenarios (synergetic, trade-off and incompatible), and the SCP tool is used for zoning. The results show the following. First, the incompatible scenario prioritizes the conservation of supporting services and provisioning services, which support ecological protection and cultivated land security. Second, given a land management and control threshold, the management zones can be compatible with a large proportion of secondary services in the synergetic scenario (22%). Fewer secondary services are compatible under the trade-off scenario (8%). As the compatible secondary service targets increase, each management zone area experiences a nonlinear change. The spatial change is more stable in the synergetic scenario compared to the trade-off scenario, and the space of management zone becomes discrete under the trade-off scenario. Third, the compatibility process has a feedback effect on the ES relationship. Compared with the trade-off scenario, compatible synergetic services are more stable with respect to changes in the ES relationship. Constructing ecological buffer zones takes up cultivated land, decreasing the synergy between carbon sequestration services and food production services. However, ecological buffer zones should play a role in certain areas. The compatibility of increased food production services and habitat services in priority conservation and controlled development zones enhance ES trade-offs. An increase in cultural services is compatible with carbon sequestration services in the ecological buffer zone. This changes the relationship between ES, from having a weak trade-off to having a weak synergy. Creating a compatible ES is a spatial trade-off process; these synergies and trade-offs should be considered in spatial planning. An appropriate proportion of ES should be allocated to each zone, to increase the coordinated management of the urban-rural ecology.
Subject(s)
Conservation of Natural Resources , Ecosystem , Carbon Sequestration , China , City PlanningABSTRACT
In the Internet age, emotions exist in cyberspace and geospatial space, and social media is the mapping from geospatial space to cyberspace. However, most previous studies pay less attention to the multidimensional and spatiotemporal characteristics of emotion. We obtained 211,526 Sina Weibo data with geographic locations and trained an emotion classification model by combining the Bidirectional Encoder Representation from Transformers (BERT) model and a convolutional neural network to calculate the emotional tendency of each Weibo. Then, the topic of the hot spots in Nanchang City was detected through a word shift graph, and the temporal and spatial change characteristics of the Weibo emotions were analyzed at the grid-scale. The results of our research show that Weibo's overall emotion tendencies are mainly positive. The spatial distribution of the urban emotions is extremely uneven, and the hot spots of a single emotion are mainly distributed around the city. In general, the intensity of the temporal and spatial changes in emotions in the cities is relatively high. Specifically, from day to night, the city exhibits a pattern of high in the east and low in the west. From working days to weekends, the model exhibits a low center and a four-week high. These results reveal the temporal and spatial distribution characteristics of the Weibo emotions in the city and provide auxiliary support for analyzing the happiness of residents in the city and guiding urban management and planning.